socialising just to be loud
compensate for cold
lack of essential trust
warmth
i love them
despite myself
my desire to love
is unconscious and gigantesque

i never know
when i'm going to miss someone
strange coldness perplexing
i've got to work to get devotion
but once i get it
i really get people on my side
there are carl people
who can survive
my shark-like coldness
and there are those
who want something
more personal
i can be very devoted to those
who can stay the course

my soul is aching
for an impartial love of people
i'm at war with myself…

The Joy of a Fool

Being a teacher at the Callan School of English was a dream job
for me. It provided me with a social life on a plate, as well as
enough money to finance the hours I spent each evening in the
Champion public house in Wells Street, where some time after
7.30pm, after the final class had ended, student and teacher
alike would meet to drink and talk and laugh and do as they
wished until closing time. I'd usually leave at about 10.30 to
catch the last train home from Waterloo, although, sometimes I'd
miss it and have to catch a later train… in fact, I can swear I
spent one night wrapped in newspaper on a station bench deep in
the Surrey hinterland, Clandon perhaps, or Guildford . At other
times, there'd be a party to go to, or the Callan Disco, held on
an occasional basis in Jacqueline's Night Club in nearby
Soho.

Most of the teachers
socialised with their own kind, while I preferred the company of
the students, although this situation was to become modified by
1990, when my friends were being chosen from among both the
teaching and student bodies.

At night, it would be
almost impossible to extricate me from my circle of favourites
from Italy, Japan, Spain, Brazil, Poland, France…fact which
proved irksome to my good friends, Stan and Noddy, at a certain
stage in my short-lived Callan career.

Stan, a Callan teacher
and resting actor, and Noddy, a young student from the great city
of Sao Paolo in Brazil, were trying to organise rehearsals for a
band we were supposed to be getting together, but thanks to me,
this never happened despite some early promise, as Noddy was a
gifted guitarist, and Stan a potentially good front man, fact
which speaks volumes about my shallow attitude to
endeavour.As well as the perpetual
party lifestyle, I spent my spare cash on clothes, cassettes,
books, and of course, rent, that is, during those brief few
months I spent as a tenant in Hanwell, West London at the house
of a friend of my fathers' from the London session world, Robbie
Evans.

Rob was a small, dark,
bearded, always nattily dressed Welsh fiddler, whose life, lived
close to the edge, but with the absolute minimum of effort,
incarnated a kind of preternatural Celtic cool that was deeply
charismatic, yet ultimately tragic. I never knew a man to live so
fast, and yet so elegantly, as my dear friend
Rob.

I also spent several
hundreds of pounds towards the end of my time at Callan's being
initiated into the art of self-hypnosis by a Harley Street doctor
who specialised in hypnotherapy and nutritional medicine…this, in
the hope of finding a solution not just to my excessive use of
alcohol, but the Obsessive Compulsive Disorder to which I was
falling more and more prey in the late 1980s.

Yet, despite the drinking
and the OCD, I was a genuinely happy person in those days, and
any melancholy I affected - in my writings and elsewhere - should
be taken with a pinch of salt in the light of the fact that for
me, sadness was the ultimate mark of artistic and emotional
profundity, and I coveted it with all the passion of one who was
by nature essentially high-spirited.

Indeed, it may be that it
was this very carefree frivolity of mine, this absence of angst,
that prevented me really getting anywhere as an
actor.

Looking back, the
overwhelming impression I have is of a man whose primary
emotional condition was one of utter exaltation and enraptured
joy of life, although it included a tendency to veer wildly
between the effusive affection I aspired to, and the lapses of
affect I dreaded.

This complex state of
being, reflected by the piece featured at the start of this
chapter, which was recently forged from notes scrawled onto seven
sides of an ancient now coverless notebook, possibly late at
night circa 1988, following an evening's carousal and in a state
of serene intoxication, was at least partly responsible for my
losing my position at Callan's in the early part of 1990. It was
a
devastating blow, but I'd asked for it, because I'd quit without
warning, and then decided I wanted to return in my own sweet
time, despite having earlier refused an offer to do so from the
school itself.

I begged for the return
of my beloved job...not just in person, but by letter and through
poor Huw, but this time, they refused to be swayed and I don't
blame them in the slightest, because up to this point, they'd
shown incredible tolerance towards my insultingly slack approach
to punctuality and other abuses of what was a very fair
system,
until finally their patience just snapped.

So...two years spent in
the greatest job I ever had ended with the last of a triad of
decades marked by persistent frenzied social upheaval and
artistic innovation.

Reluctantly delivered
from a job I genuinely loved, I briefly revived my acting career
thanks once again to the influence of my dear friend Ariana. She
suggested I might like to play Feste for a production of "Twelfth
Night", to be staged in the summer at the Jacksons Lane theatre
in North London. Somehow she knew the director, Sandy. So, after
a successful audition for her, I set about re-learning Feste's
lines, and arranging the songs according to the original
primitive melodies. My hyperkinetic performance was
well-received, and one well-spoken Englishwoman even went so far
as to tell me that I was the finest Feste she'd ever seen. It's a
pity she wasn't a passing casting
director.

Once again, the Fool of
Illyria had served me well…and in keeping with the festive spirit
of the play, rehearsals and performances were accompanied by some
pretty heavy partying by myself and most of the members of the
cast, until the inevitable sad dispersal. Yet, if the play itself
was pure joy to be involved in, the same can't be said for
travelling to and from Highgate for rehearsals and performances,
for it was during these lengthy trips across the capital that I
started feeling the need to inure myself as never before against
what I saw as nocturnal London's ever-present aura of
menace.

It's likely that years of
hard living were finally starting to take their toll on my
nervous system, for in addition to alcohol and nicotine, I'd been
taking industrial strength doses of caffeine for years, initially
in tablet form, and then in the shape of the coffee cocktails I
liked to swill one after the other before afternoon classes at
Callan's. This may go some way towards explaining the sheer
paranoia which ultimately caused me to start drinking on the way
to rehearsals, and then for the first time in my life as a
professional actor, during rehearsals. However, I'd promised Sandy I'd not touch a
drop for the actual performances, and was as good as my
word.
Later in the year, I began another PGCE course, this time at the
West London Institute of Education based in Twickenham, taking up
residence in nearby Isleworth.

I began quite
promisingly, fitting in well, and making good friends, and as
might be expected, I excelled in drama and physical education. I
didn't drink during the day and on those rare occasions I did, it
was just a question of a pint or so with lunch. I'd mentally
determined to complete the course, but as the following piece
testifies, I was a hardly abstinent at night.
It was adapted in 2006 from a letter typed during my WLIE days
to an old Westfield friend Lucinda, now a professional
photographer. When it was recovered, having never been finished,
nor sent, it was as scrap paper, lost in a sea of miscellaneous
mementos.

A Letter Unsent

Dear Lucinda
I haven't been in touch
for a long time.
Sorry.
The last time
I saw you
was in
St. Christopher's Place.
It was a lovely evening...
when I knocked
that chair over.
I am sorry.
Since then,
I've had not
a few accidents
of that kind.
Just three days ago,
I slipped out
in a garden
at a friend's house...
and keeled over,
not once,
not twice,
but three times,
like a log...
clonking my nut
so violently
that people heard me
in the sitting room.
What's more,
I can't remember
a single sentence
spoken
all evening.
The problem is...

A Thrilling but Lethal Lifestyle

My Teaching Practice was due to take place towards the end of the
first term but I was desperately behind in my work, so
provisionally removed myself from the course in order to decide
whether it was worth my staying on or not. In the event I chose to quit, and met with the
head of my course to discuss this, and she was very agreeable,
making no effort to dissuade me.
However, rather than return to my parents' home, I stayed on in
Isleworth to rekindle my five-year old career as a deliverer of
novelty telegrams, while continuing to work as a walk-on artist
for the TV series "The Bill", based in the south London suburb of
Merton, Surrey.

I also became half of a
musical duo formed with a slim young man from the north of the
land with short reddish blond hair and brilliant light green eyes
who rejoiced in the name of Simon de Wynter, although his true
surname was a sight more Mancunian. I'd met him through an ad
he'd put in the Stage newspaper for acts for a variety show he
was putting together at the time, before going on to perform as
Mr Denmark for him a few times.

We began as buskers in
Leicester Square, before settling down for rehearsals in the hope
of getting some gigs, our repertoire consisting of early Rock and
Roll and Motown classics, as well as a host of originals, most
written by Simon, with one or two contributions by yours truly. I
wanted to call the band Venus Xtravaganza, but we settled for
Simon's choice of The Unknowns, if we were ever called anything
at all.

Although he was
specialising as a singer-songwriter at the time, Simon has since
developed into a true Renaissance man…actor, comedian,
songwriter, performer, writer, film maker and esoteric thinker.
We remain close friends to this day.Then, early in 1991, I
took off to the seaside town of Hastings for a month or so to
attempt to pass a TEFL course in that beautiful old town that's
since become a major London overspill area. How vividly I recall
the thrill of seeing seagulls hovering over central Hastings soon
after arriving at the station for my interview, which I passed,
but I couldn't say it went well. I constantly avoided my
interviewer's eyes until she virtually ordered me to look at her,
then saying something like: "I said look at me, not stare". This
as if to emphasize her belief that I didn't stand a snowball's
chance in Hell of passing.
Winter 1991 was arctic in a way I haven't known an English
winter to be since. Not literally of course, but I can remember
wearing several coats just in order to be able to bear a cold
that apparently doesn't exist any more in this country. I worked
like a Trojan but I was struggling terribly, tormented by OCD and
its endless demands on my time and energies in the shape of
rituals both physical and mental. I didn't drink at all during
the day, but at night I was sometimes so stoned I was incoherent.
Predictably perhaps I was failed. I asked the authorities if they
might reconsider, but they made it clear to me that their
decision was final.
It was a bit of a let-down for sure, but I'd loved my time in
Hastings, even while continuing the search for some kind of
spiritual solution to my mental troubles…this leading me to a
"church" in Claremont Road which was far from the kind of I'd
ultimately to seek out. At least part of the reason for my
torment may be provided by the following extracts from a letter
my mother wrote me during a fascinating but fruitless
sojourn:

"...I had a chance to
look at your library...I could not believe what I saw. These very
strange books, beyond my comprehension, most of them, and I
thought what a dissipation of a good mind that thought it right
to read such matters...I feel very deeply that you have up to
your present state, almost ruined your mind. Your happy, smiling
face has left you, your humorous nature, ditto, your spirited
state of mind, your cheerful, sunny, exuberant well-being, all
gone. Too much thought given to the unhappiness and sad state of
others (often those you can not help, in any way)...I've said
recently that I am convinced that anyone can get oneself into a
state of agitation or distress or anxiety by thinking or reading
about, or witnessing unpleasant things, and the only thing to do
is to, as much as possible, avoid such matters, to not let them
get hold in the mind. Your fertile mind has led you astray. Why,
and how?"
How many millions of mothers over the course of the centuries
have asked this of offspring who've been inexplicably drawn to
the shadowlands of life only to lose their way back to sanity?
Only God knows. Most of course, successfully make the journey
back before settling into a normal mode of life, but the danger
of becoming lost is always there, especially for those who remain
in the shadows far beyond adolescence. Eternal adolescence is
arguably one of the prime features of our era, facilitated by its
exaltation of youth. And while there are those who'd insist that
far fewer young people today are in thrall to the dark glamour of
self-destructive genius than in previous Rock eras, the worldview
still very much exists.Rock,
as I see it, has never been just a simple popular music derived
from various Folk genres, so much as an enormously influential
international subculture of varying artistic and intellectual
substance. Some critics
have even gone so far as to describe it as a religion, and they
have a point, as Rock has possessed a spiritual dimension since
its inception, and an intellectual one since about
'65.

Possibly more than any
other artist of the sixties, it's Bob Dylan who helped invest
mere Beat music with genuine artistic credibility.

Since Dylan's glory days
as Pop's first true poet, there have been many Rock stars who've
looked to earlier strains of Modernism for lyrical
inspiration. In fact, it
could be said that Rock has been the main engine of the
avant-garde impulse in the West since the late 1960s, with all
the nihilism this entails.

Those who - like me-
grew to maturity in the said swinging sixties, were unavoidably
affected on a deep and perhaps largely subconscious level by the
cultural revolution of which Rock was such an essential part. For
my part, I contend that from quitting formal education aged 16 to
coming to faith some two decades later, I was in thrall to a cult
of instant gratification that's been growing progressively more
powerful throughout the west since about 1955.

If what I'm saying is
false, then why didn't I build a future for myself during those
years, in terms of a profession, a family, financial security,
and so on? The truth is that before quitting the booze for good,
I viewed all these with an indifference verging on contempt and
it hurts me deeply to realise the extent to which I sabotaged my
life with such a negative identity.

The following summer of
1992, I made another attempt at passing the TEFL course, this
time at Regent's College named after the famous north London
park.

However, by this time I
was drinking all day every day, and the course was a disaster as
a result, even though I worked hard and even gave some good
classes. I still have some video footage of myself teaching and
not for single second would anyone watching it believe that I was
out of my head on booze.

It was a fabulous summer,
and much of it I spent in a state of manic hyperactivity. Bliss
it was to stride in the warm suburban evening sun to my local
station with the Orb's eerie "Blue Room" throbbing over and over
in my head on my way to yet another long night of drinking and
socialising to the point of ecstatic insensibility. I could have
passed out on any one of these wild nights and awoken again in
Hell, but that didn't concern me.

The romantic decadence
associated with the eighties was no longer even remotely current,
and there was a new spirit as I saw it, a mystic
techno-bohemianism which appeared to me to be everywhere in the
early nineties. I wanted to visit as many clubs and venues as I
could where it was being celebrated, but as things turned out I
only ever went to one, Cyber Seed in Covent Garden, which was
poorly attended and only lasted a short time. However, had I not
become a Christian, wild horses couldn't have prevented me from
further exploration.
Later on in this final beautiful lethal summer of intoxication,
soon after appearing as Stefano in "The Tempest" at the Conway
Hall in Red Lion Square, I set out on yet another PGCE course, this
time at the University of Greenwich in south east London. Bearing
the suffix fe for Further Education its purpose was to train myself and
my fellow students to teach pupils in sixth form colleges and
other further education establishments. On top of this, there
were the gigs with Simon, the novelty telegrams, and who knows
what else, and I loved every second of a frenetic lifestyle which
the following piece - almost certainly drafted on 8 October 1992,
or perhaps a year earlier - serves to evoke it at its apex...and
there's a twilight mood to it, with the birthday boy performing
his Dionysian solo dance in defiance of the wholesale ruin of
mind, body and soul he's so obviously invoking.

Lone Birthday Boy Dancing

Yesterday for my birthday,
I started off
with a bottle of wine...
I took the train
into town...
I had half a bitter
at the Cafe de Piaf
in Waterloo...
I went to work
for a couple of hours or so;
I had a pint after work;
I went for an audition;
after the audition,
I had another pint
and a half;
I had another half,
before meeting my mates,
for my b'day celebrations;
we had a pint together;
we went into
the night club,
where we had champagne
(I had three glasses);
I had a further
glass of vino,
by which time,
I was so gone
that I drew an audience
of about thirty
by performing a solo
dancing spot
in the middle
of the disco floor...
We all piled off to the pub
after that,
where I had another drink
(I can't remember
what it was)...
I then made my way home,
took the bus from Surbiton,
but ended up
in the wilds of Surrey;
I took another bus home,
and watched some telly
and had something to eat
before crashing out...
I really, really enjoyed
the eve, but today,
I've been walking around
like a zomb;
I've had only one drink today,
an early morning
restorative effort;
I spent the day working,
then I went to a bookshop,
where, like a monk,
I go for a day's
drying out session...
Drying out is really awful;
you jump at every shadow;
you feel dizzy,
you notice everything;
very often,
I don't follow through…

This is the alternative roman a clef version, so some names have
been changed. Actually posted on 24 july 2010.